Recoil

Recoil Party in Prague 9/29/07, filmed, mixed and uploaded by recoilogy.com

I found the link to this essay by Recoil mastermind Alan Wilder through a blog post by electronic artist James D. Stark. It's a fascinating read for those of you who, like me, enjoy obsessively contemplating changing technology and how the old fogies at the major labels can't keep up with the times.

Wilder is an innovator in a music industry marked by mediocrity. I say this as a matter of fact, not simply because I have been a fan of his work since I was 10 years old and bought a copy of Depeche Mode's Music for the Masses, which stayed locked in my tape player for months. Prior to the release of subHuman, he sent out various YouTube videos updating fans on the status of the project. This was an excellent move and other musicians dealing with loyal fan bases should take note of it. How can I prove that the films worked? Well, my friend Annie and I, aka the San Fernando Valley Alan Wilder Appreciation Association, couldn't stop talking about the then-forthcoming release for almost a year. He is also a stellar producer and I recommend any reader heed his wisdom on sound quality in the MP3 age. Personally, I tried to get with the times and download my music like everyone else, but it didn't take long for me to learn that the sound quality is abysmal. Wilder's example of Arctic Monkey's hit "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor" is a great example of volume or sophistication. Thanks to Mr. Wilder, I now understand why I can't muster up the energy to care about much contemporary music. It's not that I'm old!

Anyhow, last summer, I had the privilege to interview Alan Wilder over the phone for The Rockit, the magazine I used to edit. I really enjoyed the interview, not so much because of my interest in his music (oftentimes, you can be a fan of an artist and find out he/she is a bore to interview) but because his answers were quite informative.

Since The Rockit never archived stories, I am posting the text of the article below. If you would like, I might post the Q/A later, but that might read oddly because the cross-seas connection was shite.

Recoil: It Doesn't End with the First Listen

By: Liz Ohanesian

Published: August, 2007 in The Rockit

The first notice came in October, 2006 by way of a video recorded a month prior and posted on YouTube by MuteChannel. Alan Wilder sat in an iron-trimmed chair in the corner of a neutral colored room, dressed in black and sporting sunglasses and messy auburn hair. His voice echoed as he spoke to his fans briefly and almost vaguely about the events of the past year, wherein he had taken to recording his fifth studio album as Recoil. More than half a decade had elapsed since his last album, Liquid, and more than 10 years had flown by since he left Depeche Mode. For people like me, who had followed Wilder's career throughout the majority of our lives, this video was a revelation. Finally, our beloved wizard of dark electronics was back.

"People definitely appreciated it," says Wilder of the initial YouTube message and several follow-ups that appeared over the course of the next 10 months. "One of the things that I really quite enjoy about the MySpace Generation is that the fans can talk to each other and also to the artist. With YouTube, it really lets you know who your audience [is] and what they want and what they think about."

Wilder's fans are a devoted and vocal lot. In the weeks that passed since the artist's first YouTube appearance, his legions took to message boards on sites like depechemode.com to share their excitement, wish him well and make a few cracks about his unkempt hair.

Whether coincidental or not, when Wilder made his second video message in April of this year (which, actually, wasn't online until May), he sported a new, clean-cut style. It was in this second video that fans were introduced to the voice of Joe Richardson, an Austin-based blues musician whose rough vocals drive the bulk of Recoil's latest album, subHuman. (British singer Carla Trevaskis also contributed to the effort and provides a thoughtful counterpoint to Richardson's often severe tones.)

With subHuman, it appeared to fans that Wilder was fully realizing an electronic approach to the blues that had been bubbling beneath the surface of his career for years. Throughout his two-decade tenure as Recoil, Wilder has often experimented with the style. The most noteworthy of these tests is "Electro Blues for Bukka White," which revolved around a recording of "Shake 'em on Down" from the renowned delta blues artist and was released on the 1991 album Bloodline. (Keep in mind that this was years before Moby utilized Alan Lomax's catalog of field recordings on Play.)

"It's more by accident than design," says Wilder of subHuman's leanings, "but it's clear that the blues keeps cropping up in my music, so it's obvious that it is something I'm interested in."

Recoil began in 1986, when Mute label head Daniel Miller heard some four-track demos Wilder had created. For years, the endeavor remained the musician's side project, something to entertain his less commercial leanings while enjoying the downtime between commitments to his primary band. After his 1995 split with Depeche Mode, though, Recoil became Wilder's full-time gig, sporadic as his releases are.

"I would say that all of the sounds that you hear in Recoil are a reflection of my musical tastes and the things that I listen to and have listened to over the years," Wilder explains. "There are all kinds of things in there, but this blues thing does keep recurring. I just go with it really."

He continues, "I just started making music this time around and it all seemed to naturally go off in that kind of direction, so I thought, I'm not going to fight it. I will go with the flow. From there, it was the case, let's go find an authentic blues singer to do some sort of justice to that. Hence, we have Richardson."

Wilder happened upon the singer while perusing the Internet for stylistically appropriate artists. Eventually, he traveled to Austin to record Richardson on the blues man's home turf.

"We actually recorded, I think, eight or nine tracks, of which we used five," says Wilder. "I had to record vocals, guitars, bass and drums, so we were stuck in the studio most of the time."

They worked in a studio filled with vintage gear throughout a week of 100 degree heat that gave way to the Texas-sized mosquitoes that made a meal out of Wilder.

On his night off, Wilder went to see Joe Richardson Express play at one of the group's resident venues. "It was really interesting and quite a culture shock, when you come from England, to suddenly be in the middle of that environment with every bar with an open door and a blues band playing."

For the bulk of the album, the two worked in standard Recoil fashion, where Wilder creates a "sound bed of atmosphere, some kind of loose structure" to which the collaborator adds a piece and the pair continues from there. In two exceptional cases, "Backslider" and "5000 Years," Richardson provided Wilder with the bones of the songs, which were then fleshed to perfection. In the case of "5000 Years," which deals with the current conflict in the Middle East, Richardson's lyrics became the centerpiece of the track.

"There was very much a focus on his words from the start," says Wilder. "So, of course, I started thinking, how can I enhance the feeling or the meaning of the song? Of course, I tried to create the picture to go with the words. In that case, it's going to be a comment on the Middle East conflict."

In "5000 Years," Wilder creates a densely-layered piece filled with the purr of helicopters and stomp of foot steps. Somewhere interwoven into the track is an assortment of Middle Eastern sounds.

"If I remember rightly, I kind of pitched it down and reversed it and then stuck it through an amp," says Wilder of the samples he used in this instance. He could not recall the actual source material.

"I've got such a strange library or catalog of bits and pieces that I turn to and then I kind of use my tools and various boxes until something comes out of the other end and has the right feel," he explains.

Through Recoil, Wilder has been able to foster a sound that is reflective of the era in which it was made without sounding particular to that time.

"In some ways, my music is very modern, but in other ways, I don't think it fits in with the current scene," he acknowledges.

"I just put music together in a way that sounds right to me and interesting and I do things that I want to hear," Wilder adds. "Maybe I'm influenced by those things because I don't hear them anywhere else…In that sense, I'm analyzing it, but, generally, I'm trying to work with it instinctively, intuitively and let one experiment lead to the next to see where it goes."

He concludes, "I'm always going to be interested in a kind of depth to the sound and space in the sound and trying to create a picture and my music always seems to have a lot of layers and depth to it because that is what I enjoy. Anytime I listen to a record, I want to hear something new with it. I don't want it to be over with one listen."